An Exploratory Study Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Innovative Model for Teaching Multicultural Social Work Education

Effective social work practice with diverse populations requires the successful incorporation of multicultural knowledge, awareness, and skills. As a result, there is a pressing need for innovative and evidence-based teaching strategies and methods that provide social work students with these key multicultural tools. This paper describes one such teaching model and presents the findings of an exploratory study to empirically evaluate its effectiveness with undergraduate social work students (N = 23) enrolled in a multicultural social work course. Based on pre- and post-test composite scores, the findings suggest that this new model of multicultural instruction and assignments increases students' multicultural awareness and knowledge. (C) 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.